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Final Impression

       They Cage the Animal at Night by Jennings Michael Burch is a beautiful story. From the first page, I was swept into Jennings’s world where the theme of loss is constantly repeated. The first- person perspective the author takes in writing this memoir demonstrates his innocence, sorrow, and confusion throughout the plot, beginning when his mother leaves him in the Home of the Angels. From there, it seems everything and everyone Jennings loves goes away: “‘So many people I liked have come and gone in my life… I made the mistake once of forgetting it could all end tomorrow, and I paid for it… it ended, and it hurt twice as much’”(245). Jennings, in this way, never learned what love was. He struggled to comprehend the meaning after being told by his dying brother, Jerome and his friend, Sal. Another beautiful aspect of this memoir, are the life lessons taught to Jennings. Dealing with so much pain could have shattered his soul, but with the advice and teachings of those closest to him, he was able to cling to the broken shards and put them back together again and again: “ Well I met an old man one day. He was sitting on a park bench… I told him to get off my bench… he got up and started to walk away, but then he stopped. He turned back toward me and leaned on his cane. He said ‘You know sonny, all my life I’ve been bitter and mean and angry… I never went out of my way to talk to anyone’… ‘That’s why I was sitting all by myself’”(159). This is just an example of the guidance Jennings would receive.
I had not taken this book seriously when I had picked it up and wrote my initial impression, but I now understand the comments written on the back cover and inside pages. I feel that everyone should read this memoir. It is such a powerful novel, going beyond just his experience in the homes, but diving into the aspects of life. Although it is completely different from Maus I by Art Spigelman, this memoir does share one quality with Night by Elie Wiesel: The loss of childhood. Despite this being the only similarity, the outcome of both is a strong novel that I have enjoyed reading.

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Title Significance

              In the first home that Jennings is taken to named Home of the Angels, he is lonely, scared and confused. The nuns who run the place are strict and they hit him. Then, one night his new friend, Mark, takes him to line that is forming behind a desk. Sister Clair, Jennings's favorite nun, comes, unlocks a cabinet and hands out stuff animals to the eager children waiting in line. Jennings is handed a fuzzy dog with floppy ears and immediately loves him. When Jennings wakes up, he is mortified to see that his fuzzy companion, named Doggie, has gone missing. When Mark calms him and tells him that the nuns take them away at night, Jennings asks why. Mark heatedly replies, "It's the rules! They cage the animals at night!"(26). This saying or theme is constantly repeated throughout this memoir: "it was the first time Doggie was ever away from his cage and out of the home"(41). The title,  They Cage the Animals at Night , has a much deepe...
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Connections

          The piece of work I feel connects well to  the memoir, They Cage the Animals at Night   by Jennings Michael Burch, is the song Time We Had by The Mother Hips. The tone is calm and hopeful matching Jennings’s inner emotions at the beginning and towards the end of the novel. The memoir itself although written in a child-like tone, also portrays a hopeful and struggling expression.             Throughout the novel, Jennings runs away many times from the foster homes he is forced to stay at. Instead of going to where his family is although the location is always changing, he runs to the zoo, which becomes his new home. This matches the lyrics “on the way home” in the song. Another time Jennings is running away, he walks through a graveyard in the dead of night attempting to cross the Whitestone Bridge. As he walks through, a man, acting as a ghost frightens him out of the graveyard, go...
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Emotional Reaction

At the end of chapter 4, I was feeling despair for Jennings because of all that he had to go through. Upon coming back to the Home of the Angels from the Carpenters, Jennings tells all of the other children of his stay. He goes through the whole tale without shedding a single tear, but later on when he tells his story to the nurse and Sister Frances, he cries. This scene made me so sad because Jennings had subconsciously hid his fear, sadness and loneliness. Uttering his story aloud to people he was not striving to impress made him realize what he had been feeling. After hearing his story, Sister Frances, to the surprise of Jennings, treats him gently: “[Sister Frances] brushed back the hair on my head and left. For a moment she seemed different. A little like Sister Clair”(51). I liked Sister Frances in this part of the chapter because it is shown that she is harsh with the children but she actually does care about them.          Another bittersweet moment is ...
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